Headquarters Northern Sea Route

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The northern sea route

The Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route ( Russian Главное управление Северного морского пути or as acronym Glavsevmorput, Главсевморпуть ) was established in December 1932 in Moscow by the government of the Soviet Union at the Council of People's Commissars established. It was responsible for a huge territory of eight million square kilometers: in the European part of the USSR the islands and waters of the Arctic Ocean , in the Asian part the entire area north of the 62nd parallel. Her area of ​​responsibility thus extended from the Kola Peninsula to the Chukchi Peninsula and on the water from the Barents Sea to the Bering Sea . Its first director was Otto Schmidt .

prehistory

The foundation was preceded by the historic voyage of the icebreaker Alexander Sibirjakow under captain Vladimir Voronin (1890–1952) and expedition leader Otto Schmidt, who in 1932 conquered the Northeast Passage (Russian: Northern Sea Route) for the first time in one shipping period. How demanding this sea route is, however, was proven in 1934 by the fate of the Cheliuskin , who was crushed by the ice masses in the Chukchi Sea during the same task . The incident demonstrated how poorly the movement of the ice sheet in the Arctic had been understood by then. The Sibirjakow had traveled the northern sea route in a west-east direction, in the opposite direction the icebreaker Fyodor Lütke mastered the route for the first time in 1934 under Captain Nikolai Nikolayev (1897-1958) in one shipping period.

Development of the Arctic Coast

In principle, the Northeast Passage was therefore navigable for economic and national defense purposes without wintering. The head office received the order from the Central Committee of the CPSU to “make the Northern Sea Route from the White Sea to the Bering Strait finally usable, equip it, keep it in good condition and ensure the safety of shipping on this route”. For this purpose, 16 hydrological stations and the Arctic Institute of the USSR were subordinated to it. All icebreakers in the country were integrated into the fleet of the head office and from 1938 new, powerful icebreakers were mass-produced. Two areas of operation were established, separated by the 140th degree of longitude. The western section included the Barents Sea, the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea , the eastern section the East Siberian Sea , the Chukchi Sea and the Bering Sea.

From then on, the mouths of Ob and Jenissej , as well as Lena and Kolyma were regularly called by ships. Complete sea manuals had to be drawn up and an ice service set up. Airfields were set up and ice reconnaissance from the air began two months before the start of a shipping period. A network of polar stations with radio communication was established. There was an intensive search for mineral resources along the Arctic Coast. Beyond the Arctic Circle, new ports such as Igarka , Dikson and Pewek emerged in the 1930s and 1940s . As the successor to Otto Schmidt , Iwan Papanin was appointed head of the Nördlicher Seeweg head office in 1939 .

War in the Arctic

On June 22, 1941, the German Reich attacked the Soviet Union. Papanin had Cape Shelaniya in the north of Novaya Zemlya and Dikson at the exit of the Yenisei Bay equipped with guns. That year, German submarines and aircraft were only active in the Barents Sea and the White Sea . Most of the ships in the Northern Sea Route Headquarters were placed under the White Sea Flotilla; cannons and machine guns attached to the icebreakers.

In the west, Arkhangelsk was the first ice-free port behind the front. The cargo of the Allied ships that was brought to the Soviet Union under the Lend Lease Act was supposed to be unloaded there . The northern sea convoys coming from Scotland and Iceland were protected by the British Navy up to 20 degrees east , after which they were taken over by the Soviet Northern Fleet . In Arkhangelsk, Ivan Papanin had the quay facilities expanded so that large steamers could be handled, and new ports were built at the Dvina estuary in Severodvinsk and Ekonomija. The river channel had to be deepened considerably. Ekonomija was connected with a 43 km long railway line, for which thousands of tons of bedding material were laid on the swampy floor of the tundra . However, there was still no bridge over the Northern Dvina, so a makeshift railway line had to be built over the frozen river. On it, the unloaded tanks could be brought individually over the ice. The first Allied convoy arrived in Arkhangelsk on August 31, 1941, a total of seven convoys passed through that year. During the war years, a total of five million tons of supplies passed through Arkhangelsk.

In view of the ice situation in the winter of 1941, there was nothing else to do but to put the port of Murmansk back into operation just 40 kilometers from the front. All the port facilities there had been dismantled and removed. With 5000 helpers and 1500 residents from the city, the port was repaired in almost daily bombing raids from Finland and Norway . During the war it developed into one of the most fiercely contested objects in the north of the Soviet Union. The first convoy under cover of the polar night arrived in Murmansk on January 11, 1942.

1942 was the hardest year of the war in the Arctic. After the defeat at Moscow , the German Reich tried to paralyze supplies via the Northern Sea Route. At the end of July 1942, German submarines appeared for the first time in the Arctic and attacked Soviet polar stations. The heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer operated in the Kara Sea and sank the Sibiryakov in August . The voyage of the convoy PQ-17 from Iceland to Murmansk in June 1942 was particularly bad : only eleven of 34 ships made it through. After this disaster, the convoys did not resume until September. In the spring of 1943, the Allies suspended shipping for almost nine months.

The eastern section of the Northern Sea Route was also strategically important. US aircraft were flown to the Chukchi Peninsula by US pilots under the Lend Lease Act and then taken to Krasnoyarsk by Soviet pilots . For this purpose, airfields with fuel stores had to be created and supplied. Shipping depended on a secure coal supply, with Vorkuta - despite the poor quality of its coal - becoming the most important supplier. The entire route of the Northern Sea Route was equipped with coal deposits. On August 12, 1944, the German submarine U 365 torpedoed the steamer Marina Raskowa near the island of Bely with two escort ships, which went down with 618 people on board. However, of 258 ships from the convoys on the Atlantic, only six were lost this year .

post war period

In 1946 Alexander Afanassjew (1903–1991) replaced Ivan Papanin in the position of director. After the Second World War, the expeditions were resumed: in 1946 the North Pole icebreaker explored the northeastern seas, the Lütke explored the Kara Sea in 1948 and the Greenland Sea in 1955. From 1948 flights into the higher atmosphere were made; In 1950 an ice drift station was put back into operation. Numerous new icebreakers were built, including the nuclear icebreakers Lenin and Arktika . The number of research stations was expanded to over 100. From 1954 onwards, the Nördlicher Seeweg main administration had to hand over numerous tasks to other ministries; In 1970 she was incorporated into the Ministry of Ocean Shipping.

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